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Nano is no longer a GNU project

nano-editor.org

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Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#61

Post by adrianN »

klakier wrote: post #50
cm3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if a or the driving force of a project takes things elsewhere, the users will eventually follow. If the disagreement was over GNU's insistence to require assigning copyright to the FSF, then I can fully understand the reluctance. It's the same reason many contributors cannot officially submit patches to side projects of Google employees, Ubuntu projects, etc.

Do you know that according to copy rights, open source projects are mess. Nobody tried it in the court, but if some developer contributing to project went to court saying "This part of code is mine, I don't want it to be modified by other people", then the project could be in trouble. Nobody tried that (yet). That's why some OS projects require signing Developer Certificates of Origin etc.

No, the courts have already handled cases around the GPL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Leg...

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#63

Post by davexunit »

avar wrote: post #56
davexunit wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>developers don't have to assign copyright to the FSF for it to be an official GNU project This is correct, but it's up to the maintainer to decide if their project will require copyright assignment from all contributors or not. I send patches to a couple of GNU projects, Guile and Guix. Guile requires copyright assignment, Guix does not. Assigning copyright to the FSF is very much unlike assigning copyright to a for…

As I recall the terms include some phrase like "we might change the license to be similar in spirit to the existing one" which gives FSF and anyone who controls it in the future a lot of wiggle room. E.g. the GPL v2 to v3 transition was enabled by that, with the introduction of patent/"TiVo" clauses. No reason they couldn't make more drastic changes in the future.

That means that the contributors agreed to license the code as "GPL version 2, or at your option any later version", which means that they are amenable to changes to the GPL. The FSF could not, however, make a GPLv4 that was a proprietary software license or something. I wouldn't have signed copyright assignment forms if that was a possibility.

Really, FSF copyright is a very good thing, and you can even do it completely digitally in the US and Germany (used to be that you had to use snail mail to receive forms and send them back). People shouldn't get scared away from contributing to GNU projects that choose copyright assignment. There's no better place to protect the GPL than at the FSF.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#64

Post by klakier »

adrianN wrote: post #61
klakier wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know that according to copy rights, open source projects are mess. Nobody tried it in the court, but if some developer contributing to project went to court saying "This part of code is mine, I don't want it to be modified by other people", then the project could be in trouble. Nobody tried that (yet). That's why some OS projects require signing Developer Certificates of Origin etc.

No, the courts have already handled cases around the GPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Leg...

These are about violation of GPL, none of the suits was filed by individual developer who was contributing to the code base. Show me better examples.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#66

Post by kingofspain »

bechampion wrote: post #2

don't want to sound nasty , but is anyone there using nano really ? i know it come by default in some distros but that's about it really.

Constantly - for editing crontab, or occasionally to tweak some config stuff on dev boxes. I also do a lot of PHP though so that could explain it...

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#67

Post by kriro »

cronjobber wrote: post #30

From the mailing list, on using Github: > Plus, in order to use their services, you need to assume liability That sounds bad, as in really bad. One important function of Open Source licenses is to get as far away from liability as possible. Do people here know whether that's just a misunderstanding, or a realistic risk of keeping code on Github?

Also worth mentioning that liability laws can be rather different from country to country. Germany (and Austria iirc) is somewhat notorious in that regard as you can't completely "get rid of" liability and warranty. There's no public domain for example (technically that's still debated but the main opinion seems to be it's not possible for me to release anything as public domain, see §29 UrhG-D).

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#68

Post by infodroid »

klakier wrote: post #50
cm3 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if a or the driving force of a project takes things elsewhere, the users will eventually follow. If the disagreement was over GNU's insistence to require assigning copyright to the FSF, then I can fully understand the reluctance. It's the same reason many contributors cannot officially submit patches to side projects of Google employees, Ubuntu projects, etc.

Do you know that according to copy rights, open source projects are mess. Nobody tried it in the court, but if some developer contributing to project went to court saying "This part of code is mine, I don't want it to be modified by other people", then the project could be in trouble. Nobody tried that (yet). That's why some OS projects require signing Developer Certificates of Origin etc.

The way I see it, if you contribute to a project for example by sending a patch to it by email or pull request then you agree to be bound by the license. Even if there is no copyright assignment. Otherwise you would not have the right to modify the software to write your patch in the first place. This just seems like common sense to me.

Re: Nano is no longer a GNU project

#70

Post by thomasahle »

infodroid wrote: post #68
klakier wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know that according to copy rights, open source projects are mess. Nobody tried it in the court, but if some developer contributing to project went to court saying "This part of code is mine, I don't want it to be modified by other people", then the project could be in trouble. Nobody tried that (yet). That's why some OS projects require signing Developer Certificates of Origin etc.

The way I see it, if you contribute to a project for example by sending a patch to it by email or pull request then you agree to be bound by the license. Even if there is no copyright assignment. Otherwise you would not have the right to modify the software to write your patch in the first place. This just seems like common sense to me.

The problem is if the maintainer wants to change the license (Like GPL2 -> GPL3). That's only possible if the contributors have signed over copyright, or the maintainer can track down every person who ever sent a patch, and get them to agree.
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